Gravity
by JillianCasey
Summary: Because that's what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it, the only one that can ever get you home. A season five finale fic. AU.
1. Prologue

_This is a little overdue, but I figured I'd post it before the premiere makes me feel like this monstrosity is invalid. As always, you can blame Carto for this. Also, it's angsty. Sorry I'm not sorry._

_I don't know what I've done  
__Or if I like what I've begun  
__But something told me to run  
__And honey, you know me  
__It's all or none  
__There were sounds in my head  
__Little voices whispering  
__That I should go  
__And this should end  
__Oh, and I found myself listening  
__I don't know who I am without you  
__All I know is that I should  
_—_Missy Higgins, Where I Stood_

* * *

_December 2015_

The bell above the door clangs.

"There she is," Joe announces, his arms flung wide.

Kate smiles as she closes the distance between them, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. Everyone in line looks at her curiously. She feels their eyes sweeping over her, some more inappropriate than others, but she doesn't care. The badge on her hip has taught her to adjust to being the subject of curiosity.

Kate heads for the far side of the counter, back where the baristas do most of their work. She's learned that people are less likely to bemoan the fact that she gets to cut the line if it's obvious that the owner is expecting her. Joes calls it her corner and teases her about her discomfort with cutting in line.

"Starting to think you forgot about me," Joe says over the hiss of the espresso machine.

"Never," Kate answers. "Just got tied up at work."

"Always saving the world," Joes says. "Yours got cold, let me make you a new one."

Kate nods her appreciation and then pulls out her phone. She scrolls through her email. Just when she thinks she's caught up, ten more emails hit her inbox. It's always the worst after she closes a big case. She taps out a quick answer to the deputy director in LA and has just hit send when Joe sets a tall cup in front of her.

"Thanks," she says. When she looks up, she sees him holding out a paper bag. "Joe," she starts.

He shakes his head sternly. "It's six o'clock, Agent Beckett. You eaten dinner?"

She tries to stifle a smile. "No."

"Then here's your dinner."

"I come here for coffee, not for food."

"You come here for me. The coffee is a bonus, and the food is a necessity. Federal agents should eat dinner."

A man nearby perks up at the mention of _federal agent_. Kate ignores him and takes the bag from Joe.

"How much?"

"It's Friday. You don't pay on Fridays."

"You don't let me pay on Mondays or Wednesdays either."

Joe grins. "My coffeehouse, my rules. See you tomorrow morning, Agent."

There's no point in arguing, so Kate doesn't bother. She just says thank you and heads for the door. The bell clangs overhead, and once she's on the sidewalk, shivering in the frigid air, she takes a peek in the bag. There's an entire meal carefully placed inside. She feels like a kid with a packed lunch, but she smiles.

She hunches her shoulders against the cold and heads for the street. A hand darts out of nowhere, fingers closing around her wrist. Her reaction is instantaneous. She grabs the hand, twists it hard, and turns.

"What?" she demands.

The man from the coffeehouse is grimacing. "Ow, okay. Uncle."

Kate doesn't let go. "What do you want?"

"You're a federal agent?"

Kate looks him up and down. Messenger bag, the corner of a Macbook Pro peeking out. Rumpled collared shirt beneath his North Face coat, large coffee in hand, and more-than-a-day-old stubble. She lets go of his hand.

"You're a reporter."

He nurses his hand and looks up at her. "How'd you know?"

"What do you _want_?"

"I'm working on this story—"

"No."

She turns on her heel and walks away. She takes a quick peek down the street, sees it's clear and starts across. The reporter follows her doggedly.

"Wait, wait, Agent…Agent Beckett? I just want a minute of your time."

"You already had a minute."

"Okay, yes, true, maybe another minute? I just want to run a theory by you and then—"

Kate stops in the middle of the street and rounds on him. He freezes, startled, and sloshes his coffee over his pants. Kate lifts an eyebrow at his now stained pants, and then looks up to meet his eyes.

"No. I don't do theories, or stories, or reporters."

A car whizzes past and the man jumps. He scuttles closer to Kate, eyeing her gun. "Well, I mean technically, I'm a blogger."

"You're a writer. And I don't do writers."

She leaves him stranded in the middle of the street with cars rushing past, his pants stained and a stunned look on his face. She doesn't look back.

X-X-X-X-X

At eight o'clock, the remnants of Joe's dinner are spread over Kate 's desk. She's elbow deep in paperwork, oblivious to the world around her until someone knocks on her desk.

She looks up. Agent Nathan Keller is leaning against her desk, giving her one of his megawatt grins that make the other women they work with swoon. She likes Keller. He's a good agent and a good man, and he's had her back on more than one occasion. She knows what he's going to say before he even says it. She lets him say it anyway.

"You coming?"

"Coming where?" she asks, leaning back in her chair. The other agents at the desks around hers are pulling their coats on.

"Deacon's. I'll buy you a drink."

"I've got work," she says flatly, motioning at her desk.

"We all do. Come drink with us."

"Rain check."

"You've been rain checking me for two years, Beckett."

She smiles. "Can't get the hint, huh?"

His eyes flash with amusement. "Funny _and_ good looking. Lucky me. Glad our desks are so close together."

She nods at the elevator where a cluster of agents is milling around. "Your crew is waiting for you."

Keller looks over his shoulder and laughs. "Let them wait. When you going to let me buy you a drink, Beckett?"

Kate shrugs but says nothing.

Keller leans closer to her. "It's just a drink, you know. It's not like I'm asking you to marry me."

She goes still. Keller watches her, waiting for a response, but she doesn't have one. She just stares at her hands, at the empty fourth finger on her left hand, which is resting a few inches from her glistening federal badge.

"Maybe another time," she finally says.

"Okay," Keller says. His voice is softer, like somehow he can read her train of thought, though she knows he can't. "No pressure," he continues. "I just, you know, think we'd have fun."

She remembers, suddenly, a case she worked with Keller a few months ago. How kind he was to the victim's family. She smiles up at him. "I'm sure we would. Just not tonight. Deal?"

He grins, nods. "Deal."

She watches him go, wonders what Lanie would think of Keller.

"Shit," she mutters under her breath. She was supposed to call Lanie back. She reaches for her phone, guilt washing over her, but doesn't get to dial the numbers.

"Agent Beckett, I'm glad you're here. I thought I'd missed you."

Freedman, her boss, is leaning out of his office.

"I need to see you."

Kate rises obediently and heads toward his office.

"Close the door," he says as he makes his way around his desk. She does, and then sits in the chair across from him.

It's only once she's seated that Kate notices her boss looks a little frayed. He's immaculately put together, as always, but there are bags underneath his eyes. His shoulders are slumped, his expression worn. He sighs.

"I got some bad news this morning."

Kate wracks her brain, tries to determine what it might be. She comes up with nothing.

"We had an agent running an investigation into a triple homicide that included Gavin Hale. The name ring a bell?"

"He's a blogger based here in DC," Kate answers. "Wasn't he the one who exposed the former Secretary of State's illegal campaign contributions?"

"Yes. He was murdered, along with his live-in girlfriend and a neighbor about a month ago."

Kate frowns, a memory of a brief conversation with Stack surfacing in her mind. "That's Agent Stack's case, isn't it?"

Freedman bows his head. Dread sinks lows in Kate 's stomach. "Agent Stack is dead," he tells her.

The breath rushes out of Kate. She wasn't that close with Stack. They were colleagues; worked closely on a few cases, said hi to each other every morning. But he was the one who recruited her. He was the one who first planted the idea that she could be more, have more.

An image of her beautiful, but empty apartment flashes through her mind. Dinner packed by a stranger who owns a coffee shop across the street from her job. The silence of the cab ride home on late nights. Keller's unsurprised smile when she says no to her colleagues in exchange for more time at her desk, or a glass of wine and Coltrane alone in her living room.

"How?" she asks.

Freedman pulls his cell phone out, hits a few buttons, then holds it out over his desk. Kate leans forward. Stack's voice fills the office.

"Freedman. Stack here. The blogger, Gavin Hale. Much bigger than we thought. Cover-up big. I'm meeting a source. I'll be in touch."

The voicemail ends. Kate frowns. "That was the last time he called you?"

Freedman nods. "Last night. When he didn't check in this morning, I tracked his phone. Found him with a bullet in the back of his skull in a dumpster behind his apartment building."

The image sears through her brain, jutting up against the familiar picture of a woman slumped in an alley from knife wounds. "And we have no leads?"

"I worked the scene myself, and forensics just came back. We've got nothing."

Kate leans back in her chair. "You think it was a hit."

"I _know_ it was a hit. His apartment was trashed. His laptop was gone. His phone was wiped clean. I've been in here for four hours trying to make sense of it. IT finally got back to me and I logged into his work email about an hour ago. He had one new message. "

He motions her behind his desk. On his computer screen is an email with the subject line reading _Your Answer_. There's nothing in the email except a link. Freedman clicks the link, and the website that pops up on screen sends Kate reeling.

Senator Bracken's face smiles at her from the screen. _Bracken For President 2016_ screams at her in bold-faced, red letters beneath his face. Kate sees Freedman watching her closely. She swallows, fixes a mask over her face. Her heart is pounding.

"What is this?" she asks.

"I have Stack's notes." Freedman hands Kate the file. "Gavin Hale's best friend told Stack that Hale was working on another government scandal. He said this one would be huge."

Kate skims the file. Sure enough, Stack has notes about Hale's investigation into an unnamed, high-ranking politician.

"Who's bigger than the favorite for the Republican Presidential nomination?" Freedman finishes.

Kate stares at Bracken's face on the screen. "Favorite?" she says incredulously. "Since when is Bracken…I thought Harrison Conrad was the Republican favorite?"

"He was, until a week ago. Scandal broke about a nine-year-old son he had with his nanny. Bracken plans to announce this weekend. With Conrad gone, he's the favorite."

The room spins. Kate grabs the back of Freedman's chair and holds on, tries to tell the contents of her dinner to stay down. Bracken. President.

This is a nightmare.

"You think this email came from Stack's source?"

"Most likely. And if I had to guess, I'd say the source was a reliable one since one of my agents is now dead."

Kate nods, but says nothing. What could she say that wouldn't make it obvious that she doesn't just have a feeling about who's behind Stack's death, she _knows_. Freedman knows nothing about her real past with Bracken. He doesn't even know her mother was murdered. She wants to keep it that way.

"Bracken is a New York senator, and his connections outside of DC are almost all in Manhattan. You see where I'm going with this?"

Ice claws at her insides. "I haven't been to New York in over two years, sir."

Freedman ignores her. "I pulled your file, just to see if you had anyone in common with him. I didn't realize you'd saved the senator's life when you were NYPD."

Kate shakes her head. "Just doing my job."

Freedman nods at the file in her hands. "Well, this is your new job. You're the best investigator I've got, and you've got New York connections that nobody else does. I know how much respect you had for Stack. I'm confident that you'll bring his killer to justice and figure out exactly how Senator Bracken fits in to all of this."

Panic sets in. She wants to tell him no, assign it to someone else, but what justification does she have without revealing her past?

"I know you prefer to work alone, but I want you to assemble a team. Stack's murder makes this our highest priority, and you'll need to delegate. You can choose who you want, but I want Keller on your team."

She's starting to get dizzy. Remnants of the rabbit hole are clouding her vision, reminding her of just how fast she gets in deep. She's got the might of the U.S. government behind her and a federal badge that gives her access to resources she couldn't even dream of as a homicide cop. She's just been given the go-ahead by her boss, which translates to a go-ahead from the Attorney General himself, to investigate the man she knows murdered her mother and Captain Montgomery. She should be elated.

So then why is she nauseous?

"Agent Beckett?" Freedman prompts. "Is something wrong?"

Kate realizes she's been standing, frozen, next to her boss's desk for at least a minute. She clears her throat.

"No, sir."


	2. One

_When silence falls  
__That is when I feel lonely  
__When silence falls  
__If falls too heavily on my shoulders  
__And then I feel the absence of you  
_—_Mads Langer, When Silence Falls_

* * *

_August 2016_

"I thought I gave you a few days off?"

Kate looks up from her desk to see Freedman sipping a cup of coffee and eyeing her suspiciously.

"You did, sir," she says, straightening. Her shoulders tighten painfully, and she rolls them in a failed attempt to loosen her muscles. "But I just got word that Cooper fell through, and that was our last solid lead."

Freedman stares at her but says nothing.

"The Republican National Convention is in a week," she continues, feeling the need to fill the silence. "And the circumstantial evidence we have, despite the fact that it fills half a dozen file folders, isn't enough to stop the convention from nominating Bracken. I need something tangible. I have to find Stack's source."

"You can find Stack's source on Monday."

Kate grits her teeth, exhales through her nose to dispel the frustration. "With all due respect, sir, I've been trying to find him for nine months and haven't been successful. Why would Monday be any different?"

Freedman shrugs. "Why's tonight any different? Or tomorrow and Sunday?"

He's got her there. She wants to explain to him that she couldn't stop even if she wanted to. He's right; she probably won't find the source this weekend, and two days off would do her good, but she can't stop trying or she'll drive herself crazy. She can't keep hanging around the office either, though. She's kept her personal connection to this case to herself for nine months, and that can't change now. If he finds out the truth he'll take her off the case, give it to someone else who doesn't know it like she does, and then she'll really go insane.

She smiles, closes the file folder she was looking through. "Yeah. You're right."

Freedman smiles. "Go home. Your team will do the heavy lifting for a few days, and you can come back rested and ready on Monday."

She nods like she has complete confidence in her team. It's not that she doesn't. They're good at what they do, and Keller is in charge when she's gone, so everything will be run exactly the way she'd be running it if she were here. But they don't know what they're really dealing with. They're not invested like she is.

She stands, starts to go through the motions of gathering her things. "Thank you, sir."

Freedman smiles kindly and then turns away. Kate watches him go, waits until he's in his office, and then turns back to her computer. With a few clicks of the mouse, the files she was looking at are scanned and waiting in her inbox.

X-X-X-X-X

Three hours later, she's leaning heavily against the bar at Mulligan's. The bartender, a young kid in law school named Noah, is watching her as he wipes his hands on a towel.

"So you think I could tack on a murder charge?"

Kate holds out her hand, wiggles her fingers. Noah places a pen in her palm. "Did your professor specify what state the case is being tried in?" she asks.

"New York."

"That's your key," she says, pointing the pen at him. She goes back to signing her name on the receipt. "New York has precedent. Look up _Hamilton vs. State_. 1974. That precedent should let you argue for the murder charge."

She sets the pen on the bar with a flourish and grins. "If you do it right."

Noah laughs. "I'll do my best."

Kate starts to pull her blazer on, but fumbles to get her right arm through. Noah's out from behind the bar in a flash, holding the jacket out so that Kate can slide her arm in. She turns to face him with a smile.

"Thanks."

"You sure you don't want me to walk you home?"

Kate holds up two fingers. "Two things. One, I live right there." She points across the street to a pristine-looking apartment building. "Two, I have a gun." She pulls her blazer aside, reveals the gun on her hip.

"You can still shoot straight after drinking all that tequila?"

Kate pats him on the chest. "I _always_ shoot straight."

She gives him a wicked smile and then heads for the door. She's definitely drunk. Her lips are numb, and her brain is fuzzy. Nowadays, it takes more and more tequila to make her fuzzy. If she had to guess, she's back to the tolerance level she had when she was in Vice, working clubs undercover and then going home to work on her mom's case. Not much has changed. She's in DC, she's an agent for the federal government, and the investigation she's doing isn't off the books, but everything else is the same. Same case. Same emptiness.

By the time she lets herself into her apartment, she feels it eating at her again. The need to _do_ something. She kicks her heels off, makes a pit stop for a bottle of wine. She doesn't want the buzz to wear off. There's a smartboard in her office, courtesy of the exorbitant amount of money that the federal government pays her to pretend like this case isn't destroying her again. She taps it on, and the screen flickers to life.

It's all there. Her mother, Montgomery, Raglan, and McCallister, Gavin Hale and his girlfriend and neighbor. Stack. A schedule of Bracken's campaign stops. Graphs and a timeline and copies of phone records, bank statements, emails. A few more finger taps, and she's pulled up the file she was working on before Freedman sent her packing.

She takes a swig of wine straight from the bottle, settles back into the worn-in armchair sitting directly across from the smartboard. Time to rearrange the puzzle pieces.

X-X-X-X-X

When the plane touches down at JFK, Castle jolts awake. The stewardess is announcing the stifling summer temperatures, as well as an incoming storm that sounds like it might be nasty. Castle rubs his eyes, checks his watch. Nine o'clock PM. He pulls his cell phone out, switches airplane mode off. Sure enough, he has a voicemail.

"Hi, Dad," Alexis's voice greets him. "I know you're on the plane and that we hadn't planned to talk today, but I just wanted to call and say that I love you. Only two months until you come visit. Talk to you on Wednesday!"

The call ends, and Castle lowers his phone. Alexis graduated in May from Columbia. Summa cum laude, of course. She had offers from dozens of medical schools, but she didn't take any of them. Instead, she joined the Peace Corps. He was more than a little terrified when she told him, but he's adjusted now. They talk on the phone twice a week, which is way more often than he expected to hear from her since she was placed in Ghana in the middle of nowhere. He wishes he could talk to her every day, just as an assurance that she's healthy and safe and happy, but he'll take what he can get.

Deboarding takes forever. He finally finds his luggage and hails a cab. On the ride home he plays the new game he downloaded on his phone, but his heart isn't in it. He's tired and he made the new high score yesterday, so it's not much fun.

When he swings the door to his loft open, it's deadly silent. His mother still lives elsewhere. Alexis is in Ghana. He thought about getting a dog, but there'd be no point. He's never home.

He spends his days jetting all over the world. He hasn't published a book in over two years. His travels are under the guise of creating a new character, an international spy like Storm, but he never writes. Not fiction, anyway. He'll sit down somewhere public, jot down a description of what he sees, but the ink of his mind runs dry when he tries to write characters. Nobody is compelling enough. So he wanders, watches, peruses markets and sites and samples food. He prefers to be out in the world, moving and living even if he's frozen inside.

He pulls a new bottle of scotch out of the cupboard and takes it with him to his office. He leaves it on his desk, takes his suitcase into his bedroom and sets it on his bed. He unzips it, unpacks the souvenirs that are carefully wrapped inside. One for Martha and one for Alexis, of course. He leaves his mother's out, because she'll be by tomorrow. He puts Alexis's in a box on the chair by his bed. She's only been gone for two months, but the box is already surprisingly full. He pulls out three more wrapped parcels: one for Esposito, one for Ryan's daughter, one for Lanie. Tomorrow, he'll stop by the precinct to drop them off. It's a ritual he has; stopping by the precinct at least once a month, usually under the pretense of dropping off souvenirs that he just happened to come across. Nobody is fooled. They know why he comes.

She's doing well, he's heard. Closed a massive investigation about nine months ago and earned herself quite a bit of notoriety in the upper echelons of the government. She's been tight lipped about what she's been working on lately.

Or at least that's what the boys tell him.

He doesn't ask Lanie. He knows she talks to Lanie much more frequently then she talks to the boys, and he's afraid that Lanie will tell her that he asked. Sometimes he wonders if she asks Lanie about him. He knows she wouldn't, even if she was dying to know, but Lanie would tell her, even if she didn't ask. So he visits Lanie, and brings her souvenirs, and makes sure she knows that he's happy. He knows she wants him to be happy because that's who she is.

He pulls the last wrapped parcel out of his suitcase and stares at it. The silence of his empty apartment crescendos and then shatters with the sound of the paper being unwrapped. It sheds down onto the floor, unnoticed.

It's a gondola carved out of dark wood. There are strips of gold carved into the wood, a design on the side. It's small; it fits in the palm of his hand, and the wood is smooth against his skin. He closes a fist around the carving and carries it into his closet. He pulls a box down from the top shelf, opens the lid, and deposits the gondola. He stares at the contents of the box.

Dozens of trinkets from all over the world. Every one from a moment when he thought he saw her. This time in a passing gondola, a woman's long hair gleaming in the sun. He nearly tipped the boat over, rushing to stand up and crane his neck to see her. It wasn't her. It never is.

He doesn't have plans for the box. He isn't foolish enough to think she'll come sweeping back into his life someday, giving him the chance to present her with a box of memories and dashed hopes. The hardest thing about losing her is the way it ended, the knowledge that he could have made different decisions just like she could have. It would be easier to accept if she'd thoughtlessly broken his heart and he could hate her. But he can't. He still remembers the look on her face when they both realized it was over, and he'd be a fool to say she wasn't as heartbroken as he was. That memory haunts him, especially here. That's why he travels all over the world trying to avoid his loft; she's still alive here. In his sheets, and his shower, and his coffeemaker. She always had a way of making everything her own without any conscious effort on her part. He's no exception.

He puts the box away, makes his way back out into his office. He settles into a chair with his scotch. He doesn't write Nikki Heat anymore, but on nights when he misses her he goes through the last Nikki Heat novel he wrote. Not the published version on his bookshelf, but the draft. The one with her scrawled comments in the margins. On the title page, a note scribbled hastily in red pen and encased in a heart.

_Always_.

X-X-X-X-X

It's two in the morning. She's drunk and she's exhausted. The shadows on her apartment walls are haunting her.

She misses him.

She fumbles for her phone, scrolls through her contacts. His name appears. Her thumb hovers over the send button. She wishes she could say that this is a moment of weakness, but its not. It started as one, back on a frigid night in January, the first night she began reconstructing her home murder board. Now it's a weekly occurrence, a coping mechanism that gets her through an ever-growing hole of black. It's just the idea, maybe, that if she called he might pick up. She might hear his voice saying her name, and there'd be a little more light than there is now, even if he hung up right after.

She hovers for a while, entertaining the idea. Then she swipes back, finds a new number in her contacts. She presses send, puts the phone to her ear. It rings and rings, then voicemail picks up. After the beep, she straightens in her chair.

"I've got two days off," she says. "Call me."

She hangs up. Twenty minutes later she's asleep.


End file.
